The original impetus in creating the first edition of Taking Charge: Your Education, Your Career, Your Life in 2008 was to produce a college success guide that directly linked college success skills to both professional and personal development. That’s especially important with the increasing trend of community and technical college students entering the workforce upon graduation as opposed to immediately moving on to a four-year college. To that end, the writing and research skills of the co-authors, Karen Mitchell Smith and Katharine O’Moore-Klopf, proved to be invaluable through the first two editions of this book.

Since that first edition, however, feedback solicited from instructors around the country combined with advances in digital publishing has resulted in a dramatically revamped third edition to be published in September 2012.

Life at TSTC Publishing is just too fun lately. Last Friday, Intern Kristine Davis, Editor Ana Wraight and I headed up to the Abilene and Albany area to tour two of the forts in the Texas Forts Trail system: Fort Phantom Hill and Fort Griffin.

Have you ever tried to hassle with documents attached to emails? In publishing, it can be an absolute nightmare. One manuscript may come as one document, while another may come as five or six. And, just forget collecting recipes for that new cookbook. Things are constantly getting lost or “archiving” themselves.

I always have been a book person. I’ve been collecting them since I was three, from the Sesame Street how-to-count books to Maurice by E.M. Forster. I love the feel of books, the smell of them, everything about them. Also, vainly enough, I like the way books look on shelves; I have a tendency to arrange them by color. There’s just nothing like a book!

One doesn’t live in San Angelo, Texas, for 10 years and not learn something about the trail of forts built in the mid-1800s primarily to protect pioneers headed west. Fort Concho in San Angelo is a beautifully restored pioneer fort, and the city has built El Paseode Santa Angela nearby as well as the San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts.

“Going Green” is one of the biggest movements in the last ten to twenty years; truthfully, for some places much longer than that even. Our light bulbs take less energy than ever before. We calculate our carbon footprints. We eat organic whenever we can afford to. Plastic grocery bags are slowly giving way to reusable cloth ones. Throwing a plastic bottle in the garbage rather than recycling will get you dirty looks. I even went to a play in London one time at a carbon-neutral theatre. The world is going green.

Who else is excited about the upcoming release of Beth Ziesenis’s Upgrade to Free: The Best Free & Low-Cost Online Tools & Apps? Whether it’s alphabetizing a list, organizing a meeting, or even an app that scans through your computer to find and delete large files to make room on your hard drive, Beth Ziesenis has found an app that can make any part of your computer life easier and less complicated. In conjunction with this extraordinarily helpful and fun book, TSTC Publishing also is launching an online community, which can be found at bit.ly/U2Fforum.